Gotham Diary:
De mortuis…
6 October 2011
The death of Steve Jobs reminds me, sadly, that I am bull-headedly obstinate about many things. One of them is an “inability” to understand what people are talking about when they sing the praises of their Apple devices. I heard them, I knew that they were happy, but what were they going on about? If working with a PC leaves me wondering, more than occasionally, if anyone is in charge, my time with the iPad has often made me feel that I’ve been locked up in a closet with Mommie Dearest and a lot of wire hangers. On Facebook, someone wrote this morning about not just falling in love with an Apple computer but wanting “to make something with it.” I can’t tell you how inane this sounds to someone who hasn’t been drinking the Kool-Aid. I am very much looking forward to getting my hands on a brand-new tablet from Amazon.
***
For a few years, I’ve been toting a leather shoulder bag that I got from Hammacher Schlemmer. It has held up very well under the strain of belonging to me, but it’s time for a new one, and I’ve already got it, in storage. I bought it as soon as I realized that the first one was a really good fit. It holds just about everything that I want to carry around, and it’s just big enough to carry an iPad in its case. (Not that I ever did, much.) Recently, HS has been offering a larger version of the bag, suitable for carrying a laptop. I thought about getting one, but then I got a really big laptop (which I wouldn’t want to have to carry anywhere, except in luggage), and then I got an HTC Inspire phone. I won’t be carrying any computers around with me, so no bigger bag.
***
Spending the afternoon with my large collection of Nanos, downloading the last tall stacks of CDs onto the iTunes, I can see that I come at all of this from a strange direction, one unlikely to be imagined by any marketer. I operate at the end of a very long tail. My taste for classical music and my already large library of CDs condemn me to a less-than-satisfying relationship with Apple’s bundle of music hardware and software. (Just this afternoon, I loaded one of the jillions of CDs that pairs the Grieg and Schumann piano concertos, and l0, the “Name” for all six tracks was “Schumann Piano Concerto.” Because the entire system is geared for pop music, I’ve had to build immense playlists of composers’ works (that’s how classical music works — we go by the composer, not the performer), and I’ve had to develop protocols for renaming tracks. Example: Mozart: Clarinet Quintet In A, K 581, “Stadler” – 1. Allegro becomes 581/Shifrin/1: Allegro, and Emerson Quartet & David Shifrin becomes Mozart/Shifrin/Emerson. I’d leave things as they were if there were any consistency to the cloud’s database. Correcting and conforming all of this information takes loads and loads of time.
I’ll be the first to say that I love having music on Nanos, but it’s also the case that there is nothing about the Nanos that I particularly like, except possibly the colors. I’d be happy with just about any flash-memory device.
***
It is a terrible thing that Steven Jobs’s life was cut short, no doubt quite painfully, at 56, and I am sorry that all the king’s doctors couldn’t keep him alive. But I’ve never been able to warm to the man or to his company, which always seemed to be more about devices than about what might be done with devices. If you ask me, computers only begin to do the things that I’d expect of them.